Saturday, January 12, 2013

The Innkeepers

I really love Ti West's directing style; he has a formal elegance to his two low-budget horror films--House of the Devil and this one--plus an amazing restraint. He really knows that scares need to be doled out with extreme prejudice, a fact that almost every horror film director has now forgotten (or has been induced to forget). In this film, Sara Paxton plays a bubbly hotel worker going through the motions on an inn's last night in business. It's all slow build, and genuinely creepy at the end, even if it's a tad ambiguous about how much horror there really is in this horror film. What I like least about Ti West's movies is the slacker vibe of his character's; this would have been much more effective had our protagonists had a little more backstory and depth than being Schlitz-drinking wage slaves.